Frustrating PC issue, boot-esque problems

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Normally I don't have many problems when it comes to troubleshooting and fixing my own personal computers but i've finally thrown in the towel and decided to seek some help...dealing with all of this during a vacation is quite frustrating. (Note: If this is in the wrong forum section feel to move it)

A few years back a built up a custom PC and it was a dream, than. Unfortunately, when some visitors were over it got a nice kick to the side and a few capicitor's got wonderfully messed up. I didn't realize this, at first, and when I finally cracked it open to check everything out I noted the screwed up caps. I ended up replacing the mobo and lo and behold i'm still having problems. Long story short it turned out the processor had gone kaput as well. Not having the cash to toss into a decent CPU I just dragged it along to deal with at a later time.

Fast forward to current. I scrapped a GF's old computer and tossed her dual core into the pc I had been working on to finish off testing it...after some bios problems I finally got everything up and running! Hooray...than all of a sudden I start getting some errors and hickups as follows:

-Random corruptions on the HDD (surprisingly enough..this is the exact same problem that originally happened to the GF's computer the cpu was in, bizarre...)
-I reinstalled the OS and everything seemed fine. Great. A week or so later the PC starts taking forever to load into windows and finally, after restarting to try and see if it would help everything finally went dead.

The current state of the computer is basically the same..it posts just fine but once it goes to load windows the screen just goes blank (The monitor doesn't cut off, it just never goes to the windows loading screen). I tried reloading windows but when I insert my disc the PC locks up at the 'Push any key to boot from the CD.." screen.

I was wondering if maybe there was some hardware conflicts so I stripped it down as bare as possible, took the mobo out of the case to make sure nothing was being shorted out, pull the cmos battery to reset everything and hooked everything up one device at a time. When I get the HDD back in during this test I get the same situation. The sata drive is recognized in BIOS, everything goes through post fine but than when it goes to boot into windows it just locks up on a black screen (From my front panel lights it seems that there's no HDD activity but the hard drive is definately going strong)

To me, it seems like it's a Hard drive problem of some sort but, to be honest, it seems to be too much of a coincedence that one of the exact same problems the older computer had has now transfered over to this custom after the processor was used for testing. Any help or ideas would be amazing.

The following is what i'm running (as stripped down as I can get it).
Windows XP Pro 32bit
Asus P5k-E mobo
OCZ PC2 5400 Ram, 1gig
Intel Pentium D CPU 3.4ghz
Ultra ATX 550W modular power supply
geforce 7950 gtx pci-e video card (mobo doesn't have onboard video)
Western Digital 250gig sata HDD

Thanks in advanced for any help you guys can give!
 
It's a CPU problem. Replace it. We just ran into that exact problem last night. It turned out to be a faulty CPU.
 
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